Liu to Start Tenure-Track Position at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

The hippocampus is a region of the brain that helps form long-term memories and plays a crucial role in helping us navigate the world. In a recent study, Yale researchers in the lab of George Dragoi, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, revealed just how it does this, enabling us to find our place in the world, recall location and direction, and finally even predict what we might find when we reach a new destination.

Of all forms of memory, episodic memory is the most intimate. We recall the sequences of events that happen to us — a marriage, a visit to a foreign country, a personal achievement — in great autobiographical detail. But scientists have disagreed about the most important elements the brain uses to encode these episodes and consolidate them during sleep. A group of Yale scientists, however, reports that it is the size and shape of neuronal assemblies — not the strength of signals processed by neurons or the order in which neurons fire — that are the most crucial elements in our ability to record past events.

How and when the ability to form and store memories arises are topics of great interest to neuroscientists. Now Yale researchers have identified three distinct stages in brain development that occur before episodic memories can form.

By observing how newborn rats first navigate and begin to remember the environments they are born into, researchers have gained new insight into how brains develop the ability to turn experiences into memory.

George Dragoi, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is the senior author of a paper published in Hippocampus.

George Dragoi, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience, is the senior author of a study published in Neuron that shows that neurons in the brain area responsible for the formation of episodic memories are organized into modules of short sequence motifs whose combination into extended sequences could generate predictive and recall codes with large capacity for rapid encoding and recall of distinct episodic experiences.

How do house hunters who visit 20 homes daily still recall details of the master bedroom of a specific one? Our memories can perform this neat trick because of the existence of modules of cells preformed based on prior experiences that can be triggered and recombined in the hippocampus to rapidly encode new experiences, suggests a new study by Yale researchers.

Alan Anticevic, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and of Psychology; and John Murray, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, have co-edited a special issue in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Twelve affiliates of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale have been awarded research grants through the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation's NARSAD Young Investigator Grant Program.